Fortress Empire and the American Pole

From Global Supremacy to the Fortress of the Americas

In our previous excavation of the Pentagon’s draft National Defense Strategy, we read the headlines as they were fed to us by Politico: a “striking reversal” from Trump’s first-term fixation on China, a sudden turn inward to defend the homeland and the hemisphere. At first glance, it looked like contradiction, even retreat—a great power abandoning its own Cold War rhetoric. But on deeper consideration, the mask slips. This is not the empire surrendering its designs against Beijing and Moscow; it is the empire shoring up its flank, biding time, and laying the groundwork for a narrower, harsher survival strategy. A ruling class that has failed to break multipolarity abroad is reasserting dominion where it has always felt most entitled: its so-called “backyard.”

The pattern is old. When the imperial core feels crisis, it does not fold its flag and go home—it circles wagons around its hemisphere, digs trenches at the chokepoints, and hardens the domestic front. From the Monroe Doctrine to the Banana Wars, from Plan Colombia to the Mérida Initiative, the same logic has persisted: if the empire cannot dominate the globe uncontested, it must at least ensure that no rival, no experiment in sovereignty, no socialist government or multipolar alliance can breathe free in the Americas. The draft NDS, dressed up in the language of “homeland security” and “regional stability,” is simply the 21st-century extension of this logic. It is a fortress doctrine, designed to hold the Americas as a captive pole of world power while preparing for future confrontations under more favorable conditions.

The rhetoric of Trump and his generals—China as existential threat, Russia as authoritarian menace—remains in constant circulation. Every podium pronouncement, every tariff escalation, every xenophobic outburst keeps the specter alive. But strategy is not rhetoric. The speeches are meant to rally the faithful and discipline allies, while the planners in the Pentagon quietly reposition resources: consolidating control of the Caribbean, militarizing the border, embedding surveillance into every facet of life, tightening the screws on Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, and pressing Brazil and Mexico into line. In this way, the supposed “reversal” is no reversal at all—it is the logic of empire in decline, trying to secure a reduced sphere so that the white ruling class can still claim its throne in a multipolar world it no longer controls.

To mistake this for weakness would be dangerous. The fortress is not passive defense; it is counterinsurgency turned inward and outward at once. National Guard units patrolling U.S. cities are of a piece with warships prowling the Caribbean. Detention zones at the border mirror the “interdiction” campaigns off Venezuela. Social spending gutted at home is matched by sanctions abroad. This is the architecture of technofascism and hyper-imperialism entwined: a domestic system of surveillance, militarization, and austerity fused to a hemispheric order of coups, blockades, and comprador restoration. What Politico announced as novelty is nothing but the empire reverting to type. Only this time, the tide of history runs against it, and the Americas are no longer the pliant colony they once were.

Monroe Doctrine 2.0: Recolonizing the Hemisphere

Strip away the euphemisms of “regional security” and what emerges is the Monroe Doctrine rebranded for the twenty-first century. Washington no longer pretends to export democracy or development. Instead, it bares its teeth and declares ownership: the Americas as the private preserve of the U.S. ruling class, the indispensable base from which to rebuild imperial capacity. The draft defense strategy signals not retreat but recolonization—an aggressive effort to topple adversarial governments, contain rising hegemons, and reassert control over the arteries of commerce and infrastructure that lace the hemisphere together. It is empire returning to its oldest reflex: if the world slips from its grasp, then the backyard must be fenced off and tightly patrolled.

The targets are familiar. Socialist and anti-imperialist governments—Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras—stand at the top of the hit list, not for their strength alone but for their defiance. Their attempts to delink from Western capitalism, to build popular power outside the comprador oligarchies, and to align with multipolar forces like Russia and China make them intolerable in a hemisphere the U.S. claims as its own. The strategy is clear: engineer regime change, starve them through blockades and sanctions, and if necessary unleash proxy wars until the old comprador class is restored. This is not innovation; it is the same imperial playbook that toppled Arbenz in Guatemala, Allende in Chile, and Aristide in Haiti—applied now with the added tools of surveillance, cyber warfare, and financial strangulation.

Yet the doctrine does not stop at the revolutionary outposts. Brazil, Mexico, even Canada—all are being pressed to remember their “place.” Brazil’s overtures to China, Mexico’s resource nationalizations, Canada’s occasional waverings on alignment—all these are treated as threats to U.S. hemispheric primacy. Trump 2.0 wields tariffs, diplomatic humiliation, and security blackmail to force them back into orbit. The tone is cruder than in previous eras, but the content is the same: prevent any state in the Americas from becoming a pole of power independent of Washington, even if it means driving them deeper into the arms of Beijing and Moscow. It is imperial arrogance chasing its own tail.

At the heart of this push is the infrastructure that binds the hemisphere. The Panama Canal, energy corridors, ports, fiber optic cables, lithium mines, and digital networks are all being folded into the architecture of U.S. control. When Washington pressures Panama over Canal management or installs Big Tech contracts across Latin America, it is less about efficiency than domination. Infrastructure becomes the choke chain on sovereignty: whoever controls the flow of goods, data, and energy controls the ability of nations to chart independent paths. In this way, technofascism at home—where infrastructure is militarized and digitized—becomes hyper-imperialism abroad, where entire countries are bound into a technological web spun in Washington.

The Monroe Doctrine 2.0 is therefore not nostalgia but necessity for a declining empire. Unable to enforce unipolarity, the U.S. seeks to build a fortress pole in the Americas: a block of comprador regimes, captive economies, and militarized chokepoints, all lashed to the imperial mast. But history does not repeat as farce alone. The very bluntness of Trump’s project has had the opposite effect—pushing Brazil, Mexico, and much of the Caribbean deeper into multipolar alliances, stiffening the resolve of revolutionary states, and convincing the region’s peoples that the old imperial leash cannot be slipped back around their necks. What Washington calls security, Latin America increasingly names recolonization—and resists accordingly.

Exporting Technofascism Beyond U.S. Borders

The militarization of the homeland is not sealed within U.S. borders. Every sensor at the border, every surveillance contract signed with Big Tech, every fusion center built into the fabric of domestic policing doubles as a template for the hemisphere. The same technologies used to monitor migrants in detention zones are exported as “security cooperation” to Mexico and Central America. The same predictive policing algorithms used against Black and colonized communities in U.S. cities are rebranded as tools to fight gangs in the Caribbean. What begins as domestic counterinsurgency is then sold as hemispheric stability. The fortress reproduces itself outward, until entire nations are wired into the same panopticon.

This is the deeper logic of the so-called anti-drug and anti-crime initiatives that Washington brokers with regional partners. They are less about narcotics or organized crime than about weaving states into a common operating picture controlled by U.S. intelligence. Databases of migrants, financial transactions, phone records, and biometric identifiers flow through U.S. servers, turning sovereignty into a technicality. Caribbean patrols and “interdictions” are the visible side of the strategy; the invisible side is the data architecture binding allies and subordinates alike. To join the network is to accept permanent dependency, because the keys to the system are always kept in Washington.

By this method, technofascism ceases to be a purely domestic order and becomes the foundation of a regional bloc. When Mexican police use facial recognition supplied by U.S. firms, when Central American militaries rely on U.S. intelligence feeds, when Caribbean governments link their customs databases to Homeland Security, the line between foreign and domestic power dissolves. The fortress is extended not by conquest alone but by circuitry, contracts, and code. This is Monroe Doctrine 2.0 rendered digital: a hemisphere whose infrastructure is subordinated to U.S. command, regardless of what flag flies over the palace.

The contradiction is sharp. Latin American governments may pursue sovereign policies in public—signing agreements with China, trading with Russia, joining multipolar institutions—but behind the curtain many are tethered to U.S. security webs they cannot unplug without tearing up their own state apparatus. This is the subtlety of modern empire: no need for open occupation when dependence is hard-wired. The draft NDS signals not only the reassertion of hemispheric primacy through gunboats and troops, but the systematic infusion of U.S. technofascist governance into every partner government that accepts its aid. The fortress thus spreads not as a wall, but as a web—dense, invisible, and designed to strangle.

Fortress Domestication and White Ruling Class Rule

The export of technofascism abroad is mirrored by its deeper consolidation at home. The U.S. ruling class knows that it cannot project power outward without first pacifying the interior. That pacification has never been neutral—it has always meant reasserting white ownership and control over the very structure of society. In the new strategy, this takes the form of mass deportations, concentration camps along the southern border, National Guard patrols in major cities, and the steady bleeding of social programs to fund police, prisons, and surveillance. Each of these is presented as a response to crisis, but together they form a single project: the reengineering of the United States into a militarized fortress governed openly in the interests of the settler elite.

The spectacle of migrant detention is not about “security.” It is about turning human movement into enemy action, reducing families to statistics in a war game. In the same way, the “drug war” provides a pretext to flood poor neighborhoods with militarized police and to justify interventions abroad. The cultural wars—against queer people, against women, against Black and Indigenous liberation—function as the ideological cement, convincing white workers that their real enemy is the oppressed rather than the bosses who exploit them. Technofascism is not only a structure of repression; it is also a pedagogy of hate, teaching entire populations to accept domination as defense and inequality as order.

Beneath this spectacle lies the machinery of domestic labor recalibration. Deportations and raids are not simply about border enforcement; they are tactical disruptions designed to fragment the working class. By targeting undocumented workers in farms, factories, and warehouses, the state manufactures scarcity and fear, driving down wages for everyone and disciplining the entire workforce. This is how reshoring becomes viable: by recreating the conditions of Global South superexploitation inside the U.S. core. Every ICE raid is not just an act of cruelty—it is a class weapon, recalibrating labor to meet the needs of capital in crisis. The undocumented are made into prototypes of the future: rightless, surveilled, disposable. Their terror is a warning to all workers of what disobedience will cost.

Every element of this doctrine points to counterinsurgency against the population itself. National Guard troops on the streets of Los Angeles are not there to repel foreign armies but to discipline restive workers. Surveillance contracts handed to Amazon and Palantir are not designed to track foreign spies but to monitor labor organizers, tenants, and students. The expansion of private prisons and detention centers is less about capacity than about embedding profit into repression, ensuring that capital has a stake in every cage built. What is unfolding is not an improvisation but the logical extension of decades of bipartisan policy: the fortification of the homeland through the criminalization of dissent and the normalization of permanent militarization.

In this sense, the “new” National Defense Strategy is not new at all. It is the codification of a counterinsurgency state that has long existed in fragments: from COINTELPRO to the Patriot Act, from the war on drugs to the war on terror. What is different today is the openness of the project. The ruling class no longer pretends that repression is exceptional; it declares it as doctrine. The white ruling bloc, terrified by the erosion of its legitimacy and the rise of multipolarity, seeks to freeze history by militarizing it. The fortress is both symbol and reality: walls at the border, troops in the streets, cameras on every corner, data flowing ceaselessly to the state and its corporate partners. This is not simply defense—it is the architecture of domestic colonial rule, rebuilt for the twenty-first century.

The Drug War as Counterinsurgency

No pillar of the fortress has been more enduring than the so-called war on drugs. Since the 1970s, it has provided the U.S. state with the perfect alibi: a permanent emergency that justifies militarization at home and intervention abroad. What is cast as a fight against narcotics is, in reality, the infrastructure of counterinsurgency dressed in the language of public health and law enforcement. In Colombia, billions of dollars in “aid” under Plan Colombia trained armies, funded paramilitaries, and secured oil and mining corridors. In Mexico, the Mérida Initiative turned a fight against cartels into a war on the poor, filling mass graves while funneling weapons contracts northward. Across Central America and the Caribbean, operations from Honduras to Haiti to the high seas have used the banner of drug interdiction to mask U.S. power projection. Every raid, every fumigation, every “interdicted” boat is less about cocaine than about disciplining populations and governments that stray from Washington’s line.

At home, the same drug war has devastated Black, Indigenous, and colonized communities. Entire neighborhoods have been treated as occupied zones, with no distinction made between addict, worker, or insurgent. The war on drugs built the pretext for SWAT teams, mass incarceration, mandatory minimums, and stop-and-frisk regimes. Abroad, it built the rationale for troop deployments, intelligence bases, and surveillance networks. The continuity is unmistakable: the drug war is not a failed policy, as liberals sometimes claim, but a successful one. It has succeeded in justifying repression, securing contracts, and keeping hemispheric states tied to U.S. military doctrine. Its “failures” in reducing narcotics are precisely what ensure its permanence, for a war that cannot be won can always be waged.

The latest iterations prove the point. The U.S. strike on Venezuelans at sea, described blandly as an interdiction of “gang members,” shows how narcotics rhetoric now fuses with the war on terror to legitimize extrajudicial killings. Caribbean patrols framed as anti-smuggling operations are, in practice, sovereignty patrols, reminding small nations that the waters are not theirs but Washington’s. In every case, drugs are the cover story, counterinsurgency the reality. The empire has simply found the perfect mask: a war that no one expects to end, and that can be mapped onto any population, anywhere, at any time.

To see the drug war as counterinsurgency is to understand why it persists so relentlessly despite its grotesque costs. It is not a war on a substance, but on people: campesinos in Colombia, migrants in Mexico, youth in the barrios of San Salvador, Black communities in U.S. cities. It is the continuous rehearsal of repression, the normalization of the fortress. In the draft defense strategy, when officials speak of “hemispheric security” or “interdiction,” they are not announcing a new mission—they are acknowledging that the drug war has already provided them with a ready-made apparatus of domination. The fortress was built long ago; now it is being named for what it truly is.

The Limits of Fortress Imperialism

For all its bluster, the fortress is not unbreakable. The U.S. may pour troops into the Caribbean, police the Panama Canal, and militarize every inch of its border, but the ground beneath it is shifting. Multipolarity is no longer a distant possibility—it is a lived reality. BRICS summits openly proclaim a new world order rooted in South–South cooperation. Brazil under Lula insists on multilateralism, trading in its own currency with China and resisting Washington’s dictates. Mexico nationalizes lithium, shutting the door on U.S. corporate plunder. Caribbean nations debate energy corridors and sovereignty, weary of centuries of Yankee bootprints. Each move chips away at the presumption that the hemisphere belongs to Washington. The fortress may be reinforced with new walls, but it is surrounded by neighbors who no longer accept its authority.

The arrogance of Trump 2.0 has, in fact, accelerated this unraveling. Tariffs and threats against Brazil and Mexico only harden their pursuit of alternative alliances. Attempts to strangle Venezuela and Cuba have deepened their ties to Russia, China, and regional blocs like ALBA. Panama’s rejection of U.S. calls to “reclaim” the Canal shows that even small states now assert their sovereignty openly. The doctrine of Monroe reborn has met a hemisphere that remembers its wounds and has the means to resist. Where Washington once installed juntas at will, today it finds governments hedging, publics mobilizing, and movements linking their struggles to the wider current of multipolarity.

The limits are not only external but internal. Every dollar spent on militarizing borders is a dollar cut from schools and hospitals. Every surveillance contract deepens public resentment at the marriage of Big Tech and state repression. Every troop deployment in U.S. cities exposes the fragility of a government that claims to be a democracy while treating its population as an enemy. The fortress feeds on austerity and fear, but these are unstable foundations. Beneath the armored surface lies a society wracked by inequality, ecological collapse, and the slow recognition among workers and colonized communities that their future is being sacrificed to preserve the rule of a declining white elite.

In this light, the NDS looks less like a masterstroke of strategy and more like a desperate gamble. Fortress imperialism can hold ground, but it cannot roll back history. Multipolarity grows, sovereignty movements advance, and revolutionary struggles persist. The United States can no longer guarantee uncontested hegemony, not even in its so-called backyard. The fortress is built high and thick, but it is built on sinking ground. Its real legacy may not be the preservation of empire, but the revelation of its decline.

Dual and Contending Power in the Shadow of the Fortress

While the ruling class fortifies its walls, the colonized and the working class are already building structures of power that point beyond the fortress itself. These are not mere protests or demands for reform—they are embryonic forms of sovereignty, created by people who know the state cannot be reformed because it was never meant to serve them. Across the hemisphere, Indigenous nations, Black liberation movements, tenant unions, and militant labor formations are constructing their own institutions of survival, governance, and solidarity. They do so in the teeth of repression, surveillance, and criminalization, but their persistence shows that empire has competitors within its own borders.

In the U.S. South, Cooperation Jackson builds people’s assemblies, cooperative farms, and land trusts, making real the principle of collective ownership in the belly of the beast. In Oakland, People’s Programs runs free breakfasts, mobile clinics, and bail funds, extending the legacy of the Panthers into the present. The LA Tenants Union organizes block by block, defending homes not just against landlords but against ICE incursions and police harassment. Most advanced is the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement, who for decades have theorized the U.S. as a settler empire and built institutions—media, housing, solidarity networks—that embody Black sovereignty in practice. Their survival programs and internationalist orientation make them a living example of dual power, no matter how ferociously the state represses them.

Indigenous nations lead the struggle for land and survival against both corporate and state militarization. The NDN Collective’s LANDBACK campaigns, the Indigenous Environmental Network’s climate justice fights, and Honor the Earth’s resistance to pipelines are not isolated environmental causes—they are declarations of sovereignty, refusals to cede the land base on which the fortress depends. Each blockade, each occupation, each assertion of treaty rights exposes the lie of U.S. legitimacy and shows that sovereignty in the hemisphere is not Washington’s to grant or deny.

On the labor front, insurgency is stirring as well. The Amazon Labor Union, Starbucks Workers United, Trader Joe’s United, and the rank-and-file militants of the UE and Teamsters for a Democratic Union are reintroducing the weapon of the strike into industries central to the circulation of capital. Their struggles defy not only bosses but the corporate surveillance regimes that mirror the fortress state. Every organizing drive in a warehouse, coffee shop, or logistics hub is not simply about wages—it is a refusal of the order that demands obedience in exchange for precarity.

Abolitionist currents knit these fronts together. The fight to Stop Cop City in Atlanta, led by Community Movement Builders, backed by bail support from the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, and joined by environmental defenders and abolitionist networks like Critical Resistance, has exposed the blueprint of domestic counterinsurgency. In facing down the construction of a police city, they reveal the very skeleton of technofascism—and demonstrate that it can be resisted. From the forest encampments of Atlanta to the tenant assemblies of Los Angeles to the land occupations of Indigenous nations, these struggles are not fragments. They are the outlines of a counter-hegemony, a dual power that exists within the shadow of the fortress but refuses to bow to it.

Two Futures for the Hemisphere

The outline of the struggle is stark. On one side stands the U.S. ruling class, seeking to weld the Americas into a technofascist bloc: a fortress guarded by detention zones, patrolled by drones, wired by surveillance networks, and governed through the comprador oligarchies that have long sold their peoples to empire. This is the so-called “American pole” of the multipolar order—an imperial fallback, where domination is preserved not by universal consent but by walls, weapons, and wires. Its promise to the people of the hemisphere is simple: austerity, repression, and permanent subordination to a white ruling minority in decline.

On the other side are the peoples of the Americas themselves—workers, migrants, Indigenous nations, Black liberation movements, tenants, peasants, and youth—who are already building another world in embryo. Their sovereignty projects, survival programs, strikes, land defenses, and abolitionist campaigns are not utopian gestures but practical answers to the crises the fortress cannot solve. Their internationalism does not mean subordination to Beijing or Moscow but solidarity with all who resist imperial rule. Their horizon is not recolonization but multipolar liberation, where the hemisphere ceases to be a backyard and becomes a community of sovereign peoples.

The contradiction cannot hold forever. Either the U.S. succeeds in fastening the Americas to its dying imperial project, exporting its technofascist order to every corner of the hemisphere, or the tide of sovereignty breaks the fortress walls and clears space for revolutionary rupture. The draft National Defense Strategy reveals the choice plainly: empire is reorganizing to survive by turning inward and downward, making war on its own people and its neighbors alike. But the very need to fortify exposes its weakness. The fortress is a confession that unipolarity is gone, and that the empire can no longer command without fear.

For the colonized and the working class, the task is clear: link the struggles, deepen the solidarities, and transform resistance into power. The future of the Americas will not be decided in Pentagon strategy papers or Politico leaks but in the forests, barrios, factories, and borderlands where the people confront the fortress daily. There, in the shadow of the walls, the outlines of liberation already take shape. The question is whether we have the courage and organization to make them real.